The study of Alzheimer’s disease and the analysis of particle collisions
may not appear to have much in common, but behind the scenes, middleware
being developed with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF)
is helping groups of researchers in neuroscience, physics and other fields
to apply the power of grid-based computational resources.

Spanning 14 universities and 22 research groups, the growing Biomedical
Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is establishing the cyberinfrastructure,
or integrated information technology configuration, needed to facilitate
health care research for large-scale data sharing and analysis. The ability
to share and compare massive data sets such as MRI brain scans or high-resolution
electron microscopy images is essential to participants’ research into
Alzheimer's disease, depression, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis and
other disorders.

With the participating research labs connected by the Internet2 high-performance
network, the BIRN cyberinfrastructure uses software from the NSF Middleware
Initiative (NMI) to harness grid-based services and resources for the demanding
computational tasks of data mining, analysis and visualization. The BIRN
is sponsored by the National Center for Research Resources at the National
Institutes of Health.

“The BIRN has great promise to provide a collaborative working environment
that promotes the growth of interdisciplinary science as well as an advanced
biomedical cyberinfrastructure,” said BIRN Coordinating Center Director
Mark Ellisman. “The NMI middleware layer is essential to providing many
of the underlying mechanisms critical to achieving this integrated environment.”

By emphasizing open-source solutions that simplify resource sharing,
NMI is making it easier for scientists, engineers and educators to work
with colleagues on a worldwide scale through high-speed networks. The integrated
tools from NMI facilitate collaborations across organizations, information
technology architectures, operating systems and security policies.

Since 2002, NMI has issued twice-yearly releases of software, services
and documentation supporting the effective use of information technology
for research and education. Issued on May 24, NMI Release 5 (NMI-R5) consists
of contributions from a wide range of middleware developers that partner
through multi-institutional NMI-funded teams at the GRIDS Center, the EDIT
consortium and the Open Grid Computing Environments consortium.

“Before NMI, many research communities were developing independent—and
often incompatible—middleware solutions,” said Kevin Thompson, NSF program
director for NMI. “The successful use of the NMI releases by BIRN, Grid3
and other teams shows that NMI’s open-source and open-standards approaches
can help scientists avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ and provide a common
foundation for building customized applications.”

Worlds away from neuroscience, the Grid3 project faces similar challenges
in data management and computing requirements for particle physics and
biological science. To conduct simulations of elementary particles that
require massive amounts of data, the Grid3 collaborators, supported by
both NSF and the Department of Energy, have deployed an international data
grid spread across 28 sites in the United States and abroad and held together
in part by NMI-supported software, such as the Globus Toolkit.

With assembled resources that provide up to 2,000 processors’ worth
of computational power, the Grid3 data grid runs seven different applications—three
high-energy physics simulations and four data-analysis programs for high-energy
physics, biochemistry, astrophysics and astronomy. The grid-enabled calculations
simulate collisions of subatomic particles, biological interactions between
molecules and protein sequences important to genome analysis.

Beyond grid computing, NMI middleware also enables many types of collaborative
computing in the research and education community. Shibboleth, an NMI-EDIT
software suite that manages user access to Web content and services while
protecting privacy, has experienced worldwide adoption in addition to having
widespread national impact.

Chosen by Australia, the Netherlands, and Finland and implemented in
Switzerland as the basis for their national education federations, Shibboleth
is also being adopted by the United Kingdom, which has made a significant
commitment to standardize on the software. The U.K. Joint Information Systems
Committee has begun work on building a national Shibboleth federation for
the country's universities and colleges, alongside its current Athens access
management system.

Established in late 2001, NMI funds the design, development, testing
and deployment of middleware, key technologies upon which customized applications
are built. Specialized NMI teams are defining open-source, open-architecture
standards that are creating important new avenues of online collaboration
and resource sharing. In addition to the production-quality software and
implementation standards created by those large systems-integration teams,
NMI funds smaller projects that focus on experimental middleware applications.
As a leading part of the emerging cyberinfrastructure, NMI software and
services are used by thousands of researchers and educators in the United
States and beyond.